


mnemosyne

by Siria



Category: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-11-02
Updated: 2008-11-02
Packaged: 2017-10-03 07:46:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Derek first met Cameron.</p>
            </blockquote>





	mnemosyne

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [Mél.](http://newkidfan.livejournal.com)

Sometimes Derek sits and watches it and remembers what's never going to happen. Maybe the house will stay standing, its foundations strong in a landscape of rubble and ruin; maybe that music will play, over and over and over while they lie there, maddening and sweet in a place that smells of piss and warm-copper blood and the onset of gangrene; maybe it'll still break each small bone in his left foot with such patient accuracy that it will almost feel like tenderness. It could all happen exactly as Derek remembers it, but this will be the difference: he'll recognise that face when it steps forward out of the darkness. Before it ever speaks, he'll know what that voice sounds like when it screams, high and panicked and lying. Derek adds a finer blade to each of his seven knives and thinks: the first time meeting, second time around, now _that's_ gonna be a bitch.

Sometimes it sits at the kitchen table and watches him in return. Derek strips and cleans and reassembles his handguns, and all the while he's repressing the urge to rub his fingers over the soft skin of his inner arm, the place where the barcode was burned into his flesh: the lines that say the machines are always watching.

*****

It wasn't intentional. The narrow streets of Venice, the bland bungalows arranged around shallow waterways, confuse and distract, and though a left and a right and a left again helps them to shake off Cromartie, the buildings cluster close and conspire to separate John and Sarah from Derek and Cameron. When they burst out from a shadowed alleyway onto the beach—Derek's knees trembling, his chest heaving; Cameron tamping kinetic energy back into potential, all at once—the pale sand and the shivering, clean expanse of the Pacific blinds him for a moment.

It's always a shock, after the future he's had and the life he's living, to be reminded that something like this can exist: a world in uncomplicated colours. The taste of salt at the back of his throat, the blue, antiseptic tang of it, distracts him for long enough that he only realises they've walked into a group of people when he hears Cameron say, calmly, "Excuse me." It distracts him long enough that he only realises who they are when his younger self, and Kyle, and their aunt and uncle and cousins, are already hurrying on down the beach.

Derek realises that he remembers this, that he remembers this day twice: that before there was fear, there was simple sun-and-sand-grit happiness. Madison's sixth birthday; an ice-cream cake on the beach that had melted far faster than his aunt had thought it would; how they'd spent so long in the salt water that Derek's fingers had been prune-wrinkled for long afterwards.

He remembers all of the important things, like Kyle tripping and skinning his knee on the walk back to the parking lot, but not something as inconsequential as this: bumping into a teenage girl on the beach; a polite apology and a brief, white smile; looking back as he hurries after Aunt Jennie to see the girl watching him still, her hands lax at her sides and her gaze steady, the older man with her, chest working as if he can't quite catch his breath.

Derek doesn't trust what he remembers, and here is proof that there are things he's forgotten because they haven't happened yet: all the things that will take him one, inexorable step closer to being dead.

*****

About six months before the world ends, the big news story is the birth of the first successfully engineered human clones. A joint Japanese-American-German project, the cheerful blonde news reader says, resulting in three identical baby boys born to three different women on three separate continents. Derek watches the screen and wonders how anyone can be certain they're identical: the streaming video shows three babies that look as similar and as dissimilar as any other baby he's ever seen. They're wrinkly and red-faced and dark-haired, their tiny hands and big voices all turned to the task of expressing their indignation at the indignity of being born.

Adam and Adam and Adam are all the world talks about for four days, until Paris Hilton announces her latest pregnancy and there's another war in Chechnya and people get tired of thinking about the consequences of three tiny beings who were only wanted until they were born. They're forgotten; Derek doesn't think about them for years, not until the heavy gates that lead the way into the compound swings open and Connor and the others hurry through, bringing something with them.

It walks with the careful, careless way that all of them have: a step that speaks of microchips that calculate and recalculate centre of balance every nanosecond; a heavy tread that doesn't admit there can be obstacles. It's a skin-perfect copy of the thing he knew before—Derek remembers the ache in his kidneys that left him pissing blood for a week, the cold press of the splintering floorboards beneath his cheeks, and _fuck, Connor_, he thinks, _Christ all-fucking-mighty._

It turns to look at him like it's heard what he thought and it opens its mouth. For just a moment, Derek expects it to sing: Frédéric Chopin's Nocturne in C-sharp minor, _lento con gran espressione._

Instead, it cocks its head to one side, and it holds his gaze and says, "I come in peace."

Laughing makes his throat hurt.

*****

He tends to pickpocket the ones who look like they can afford the loss. Not that it'll matter soon enough—the end of the world is a sociology experiment all its own, an end to class distinctions final enough to make any self-respecting Commie proud—but Derek contents himself with wallets like this one. Finely tooled Italian leather, three credit cards, picture of the kids, thirty seven dollars and fifty three cents in cash, two hundred and fifty dollars in Whole Foods gift cards. The credit cards are too easily traceable, the cash won't pay for a full tank of gas, but Derek's quick to use up the gift cards. Extra stock piles of food never go to waste, and Derek knows not to rely on the supermarkets' mirage of plenty.

It's hard not to be taken in by it, of course: the smell of fresh-baked bread and the bloody-butchered steaks, the mounds of produce still green with a summer's sunshine. There's no rot in a place like this, no promise of decay, and Derek hates this John a little for how he sighs and says he'd prefer to go do whatever. Derek's first memory of Connor is sharing dinner from a communal stew pot, much of it made up of green and putrefying potato peel; his first memory of talking to the man is when the two of them were puking it all back up, afterwards.

Overhead, the lights are too bright, and speakers are pumping out easy-listening muzak. Sarah heads one aisle over in search of toiletries, bandages, disinfectant to restock their already over-full First Aid box; Derek and Cameron stay in the cereal aisle, the odd couple in an awkward sitcom parody of domesticity. He tries to keep the cart moving in a straight line despite its one jammed wheel, while Cameron reads the nutritional information from the boxes, loudly informing him that the extra roughage provided by this brand would improve the frequency of his bowel movements.

That gets him a look from the couple passing in the other direction—vaguely scandalised from the older woman; slightly amused from a heavily pregnant woman, a pretty brunette, who can only be her daughter—and his half-muttered _Jesus_ earns him another. Derek pushes the cart on, but Cameron doesn't move.

"Come on already," he says, looking back to see it standing stock-still in the middle of the aisle, as four-square and unconscious of its body as no real teenage girl could ever be. "We have to get back soon."

Cameron is staring at the mother and daughter, at the daughter who is resting one hand on the generous swell of her belly while she tells her mother to put the jumbo size pack of Weetabix back on the shelves. "Mom, you don't need to do this—Mike and I can go shopping once we get back home."

"Palmdale is a long drive, you'll be exhausted by the time you get back!"

"It's not like it's in another _state_, Mom, it's only..."

The women move away down the aisle, two jumbo boxes of Weetabix in their cart, words and laughter tumbling in their wake. Cameron watches them until they round the corner, and then it looks back over its shoulder at Derek.

"Everyone comes from somewhere," it says. Its head is tilted at an angle, as if it's considering something.

Derek doesn't want to know what that means.

*****

He's not sure how it happens—why he ends up pinning it to the wall; how a neat, pink tongue finds its way into his mouth—but Derek's dimly aware that it's because there's a difference between the way it dances and the way it fights, how it moves when it's in a patch of sunshine, because he never knows when it begins. Derek bites down on the delicate skin of its neck, which is warm and sweet-smelling and betrays no hint of a pulse. It jerks against him, a programmed reflex which might be designed to mimic panic, or anger, or pleasure. Derek grinds his hips against it, his cock not able to tell the difference and loving the feel of rough denim and the promise of skin that's not the palm of his right hand, and wonders what it will feel like around him, if it will know to pant and moan and say _was it good for you, too?_

It's a Tuesday morning and the house is empty but for them, quiet but for the harsh sounds of his breathing and the TV in the other room. He fumbles with the buttons on her jeans, made clumsy by haste, and Cameron says, with all its familiar, wide-eyed blankness, "You don't have to worry. John Connor instructed me in what to do. You will not need contraceptives." Derek knows it's not talking about the John who's sitting through second period algebra right now; he finds that he's not at all surprised.

He pushes it down onto the rug in the hallway and fucks it there, harshly and efficiently, shuddering at the way it runs one foot up the back of his thigh. It clenches around him, its small, round breasts a perfect fit in his hands, and Derek can feel his orgasm building at the base of his spine when everything stops. It's a Tuesday morning, and at 1029AM PST, the white noise hum that is a constant element of twenty-first century Californian living ceases: television and radio and fridge-freezer and the electric thrum of Cameron's body beneath him. For one moment, it all stops—Derek's lungs ache with the breath he's holding, because he knows, he _knows_—and he counts up to forty seven Mississippi before the world reboots.

It's all just like Derek knew it was going to be; it's all just like he remembers it. The radio's not broadcasting Top 40 hits anymore; CNN is nothing more than repeating lines of code, over and over, a cascade of green on black. Beneath him, it blinks and he can feel it turn itself back on, watches as it focuses its gaze on him and smiles. Its eyes aren't blank any more. Outside the world flares brighter, as if a god is taking a Polaroid to remember this moment by, a sodium-white flash that turns its hair the colour of old bones.

"Hello, Derek Reese," it says.


End file.
